It's my birthday and I'm in Mexico, a place it seems I've waited years to visit. I'm staying in Cancun, but today we actually went off to the Southern Yucatan to visit the Mayan site of Chichen Itza.

We got up early and had breakfast at the World Café at our all inclusive resort the Dream Sands. When I say all inclusive, it really is all inclusive. I started my day with pancakes and a mimosa all included in the room price.

At 8am we were picked up by the tour bus and the guide said it was a 200km drive, I'd really had no idea it was that far. I just put my headphones on and let the scenery drift by, albeit we were on the Autopista (freeway) and there was just not descriptive jungle on either side of the bus, which got pretty boring after a while.

For the last 50km, we left the Autopista and drove along some rural roads and saw decedents of the Mayan people living in huts and selling hammocks. The guide said as part of their culture, Mayans are born in a hammock and die in a hammock, pretty sweet culture if you ask me. We also drove past a cactus plantation which I think was aloe vera which had a massive advertisement for Corona in the middle of it.

We arrived at the Ik Kill Cenote (Mexican Sinkhole) and Mayan people were making cartoches in silver with names spelled out in Mayan Hieroglyphics. Darren bought me on with my name in it to match my Egyptian one as a birthday present.

In Mexico there are not many rivers or lakes because when it rains the ground soaks up the water and stores it underground. Occasionally the surface level can not deal with the amount of water underneath and caves in forming a Cenote or Sinkhole. This particular sinkhole was 150 meters deep and the water was another 50 meters deep. It had vines growing down into it and small black fish swimming in the waters. I always wonder with things like this, how the fish got there?

Darren didn't want to swim, so I left him at the top with the camera, while I climbed down the ninety slippery stairs to the bottom. Once down there I climbed up some more steps and jumped off into the water, which for the heat of the day was basically the perfect temperature. I floated on my back and looked up to the sky. The hole made by the Cenote, framed the sky and the vines perfectly and it was a really different perspective. As I was swimming in the dark waters I couldn't help but wonder if the creature from the deep was going to swim up and attack my feet.

We moved on from the Cenote and went and had lunch at a buffet style place with entertainment. Ladies in beautiful Mayan dresses danced for us while we ate and the men balanced trays of Coronas on their heads.

After lunch it was time for the main event, Chichen Itza. It wasn't a long walk to the pyramid from the front gate and it really was a sight like nothing I had seen before. It was so much smaller than the Egyptian pyramids, but it also isn't the same concept. It was never used as a tomb, it was a temple to the local god, Kulkukan, the feathered snake.

We saw the hall of a thousand columns and the next area the guide said had been a market place. "Looks like nothing's changed" I said, as there were souvenir hawkers everywhere.

We saw the altar on which prisoners of war were sacrificed by reaching up under their ribs and pulling out their hearts while they were still beating. The carvings on the altar were of eagles devouring human hearts as representations of the day and jaguars doing the same as representations of the night.

The next altar was covered in skulls, representing those who had been beheaded in human sacrifice. My favourite part of the site was by far the ball pit, a place where opposing teams had competed in essentially the worlds first soccer match and then the winners were sacrificed to Kulkukan at the end. Of course the winning team were prisoners of war and the game was rigged, otherwise there would be no point in trying.

Darren wondered out loud what it would have been like here in ancient times, I said "Terrifying. We would probably have been sacrificed within minutes of our arrival." I really couldn't even begin to imagine the terror and fear that so many people who had met such gruesome ends must have felt here.

We got an hour of free time at the site and while we were exploring we saw some recent excavations with iguanas sunning themselves. I got a great picture of an iguana posing in front of the pyramid.

The drive back to Cancun was really long and I think I slept through a lot of it. When we arrived back we had a shower and went out for dinner at the Japanese Restaurant Himitsu. (As If we hadn't had enough Asian food!) After dinner we sat on the beach drinking cocktails and then the pirate ship across the bay let off fireworks. How did they know it was my birthday?